Robert M. Burton

By Laura Spidale Let's talk for a minute about why egghead.com loves--just luuvvvvvs--Amazon.com. "Every time someone successfully buys a $20 book from Amazon.com, it prepares him to buy a $2,000 computer system from Egghead," John Hough, Egghead.com's spokeman, said. After divesting itself of its remaining 87 brick-and-mortar outlets, Egghead in fiscal 1998 moved operations to the web. Consumers ordered about $293.1 million worth of goods from the company web site. The nation's top 50 consumer electronics retailers in 1998 garnered $64.3 billion in sales, a 10.58 percent increase over the $58.1 billion earned in 1997. No one knows exactly how much of that total to attribute to Internet